Generally, in a wireless communication system, wireless terminals communicate with each other through a base station. In this case, a medium access control (MAC) method for shared radio resources and a radio resource allocation method are defined between the base station and the respective wireless terminals.
An uplink retransmission resource allocation method of the wireless communication system will now be described.
Respective wireless terminals request uplink resources from the base station when the terminals have uplink data to be transmitted to the base station. Then, the base station considers the uplink resource allocation requests of the wireless terminals and transmission data of the base station and allocates the uplink resources to the wireless terminals.
The wireless terminals transmit the uplink data to the base station after receiving the uplink resources. In this case, when an error occurs in the uplink data, the base station determines whether the error occurs in the uplink data. When the error occurs, the base station informs the wireless terminal of a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) feedback channel or information.
The wireless terminal receiving the HARQ feedback channel or information on the error requests the uplink resources from the base station again when the wireless terminal has not received additional resources for retransmitting the uplink data. The base station allocates the uplink resources requested by the wireless terminal, and the wireless terminal retransmits the uplink data.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.